But since that time twelve more barren years had elapsed. He had plied
the trade of horse-dealer in Voronezh; then, when the woman with
whom he had been living died of puerperal fever, he had carried on
the same trade in Eletz, had worked in a candle shop in Lipetzk, had
been a clerk on Kasatkin’s farm. And his life had flowed on smoothly,
engrossed in work, in everyday tasks--until his habit of tippling had
rather abruptly turned into hard drinking. He had become a passionate
follower of Tolstoy: for about a year he did not smoke, never took
a drop of vodka, ate no meat, never parted with “My Confession”
and “The Gospels,” wanted to emigrate to the Caucasus and join the
Dukhobortzy.[16] But he was sent to Kieff on a business matter. And
as he set forth, he felt something akin to a sickly joy, as if he had
suddenly been released, after prolonged imprisonment, into complete
freedom. It was clear weather at the end of September, and everything
seemed easy, very beautiful--the pure air, the comfortable sun, and
the cadence of the train, the open windows, and the flowering forests
which flashed past them. All at once, when the train halted at Nyezhin,
Kuzma saw a large crowd surrounding the door of the station. The crowd
was gathered round some one, and was shouting and quarrelling in great
agitation. Kuzma’s heart began to beat violently, and he ran toward
the crowd. Rapidly elbowing his way through it, he caught sight of the
red cap of the station-master, the white, pyramidal cap of a cook,
resembling that of a Kazak Hetman, and the grey overcoat of a sturdy
gendarme, engaged in roundly berating three Little Russians, who were
standing meekly erect in front of him, clad in short, thick coats,
indestructible boots, and caps of snuff-coloured lambskin. These caps
hung precariously on some dreadful objects that proved to be round
heads bandaged with coarse muslin, stiff with dried serous fluid, above
swollen eyes and faces puffy and glassy with greenish-yellow bruises,
bearing wounds on which the blood had coagulated and turned black. The
men had been bitten by a mad wolf, had been despatched to the hospital
in Kieff, and had been held up for days at a stretch at almost every
large station, without a morsel of bread or a kopek of money. And, on
learning that they were not to be taken aboard now, because the train
was called an express train, Kuzma suddenly flew into a rage and, to
the accompaniment of approving yells from the Jews in the throng,
began to bawl and stamp his feet at the gendarme. He was arrested,
an official report was drawn up, and, while awaiting the next train,
Kuzma, for the first time in his life, got dead drunk.
The Little Russians were from the Tchernigoff Government. This he
had always thought of as a far-away region with a sky of dim, gloomy
blue above the forests. These men, who had gone through a hand-to-hand
encounter with the mad wolf, reminded him of the days of Vladimir,
the life of long ago, of ancient peasant life in the pine forests.
And as he proceeded to get drunk, pouring out glass after glass of
liquor with hands shaking after the row, Kuzma became transported with
delight: “Akh, that was a great epoch!” He was choking with wrath at
the gendarme, and at those meek cattle in their long-tailed coats.
Stupid, savage, curse them! But--Russia, ancient Russia! And tears of
drunken joy and fervour, which distorted every picture to supernatural
dimensions, obscured Kuzma’s vision. “But how about non-resistance?”
recurred to his mind at intervals, and he shook his head with a grin. A
trim young officer was eating his dinner, with his back to him, at the
general table; and Kuzma gazed in an amicably insolent manner at his
white linen uniform blouse, so short, so high-waisted, that he wanted
to step up to him and pull it down. “And I will do that!” thought
Kuzma. “But he would jump up and shout--and slap my face! There’s
non-resistance for you!” Then he journeyed on to Kieff and, completely
abandoning his business, spent three days roaming about the city and on
the bluffs above the Dnyepr, in the joyous excitement induced by his
intoxication.
In the Cathedral of St. Sophia, at the Liturgy, many persons stared
in amazement at the thin, broad-shouldered katzap[17] who stood in
front of Yaroslaff’s[18] tomb. He was neatly dressed, held in his hand
a new peaked cap, stood with decorum; but there was something queer in
his general appearance. The service came to an end: the congregation
departed, and the doors were opened; the verger extinguished the
candles. Through the upper windows, athwart the blue smoke, filtered
golden streaks of the hot noonday sun; but he, with set teeth, his
sparse greying beard drooping on his breast and his deeply sunken eyes
closed in a sort of happy pain, remained there listening to the pealing
of the bells, carolling and dully booming above the cathedral--that
ancient peal which had, in days of yore, accompanied the campaigns
against the Petchenyegi.[19] And, toward evening, Kuzma was seen at the
Lavra.[20] He was sitting opposite its gate beneath a withered acacia,
alongside a crippled lad, gazing with a troubled, melancholy smile
at its white walls and enclosures, at the gold of its little cupolas
shining against the pure autumnal sky. The lad had no cap, a sack of
coarse linen hung over his shoulder, and on his body hung dirty, ragged
old garments; in one hand he held a wooden cup, with a kopek in the
bottom, while with the other he incessantly changed the position of
his deformed leg--which was bare to the knee, withered and unnaturally
thin, burned black by the sun, and covered with a thick growth of
golden-hued hair--as if it did not belong to him, as if it were a
mere object. There was no one in their vicinity; but the lad, with
his close-cropped head thrown back, stiff from the effects of the sun
and the dust, displaying his thin, childish collar-bones, and paying
no heed to the flies which settled on the excretions of his nostrils,
drawled drowsily, painfully, and without ceasing:
“Take a look, ye mammas,
See how unhappy, how miserable we are!
Akh, God grant you, mammas,
Never to suffer so!”
And Kuzma confirmed him: “That’s so, that’s right!”
When he had conquered his intoxication and come to his senses, Kuzma
felt that he was already an old man. Since that trip to Kieff three
years had elapsed. And, during that space of time, something extremely
important had indubitably been effected within him. How it had been
effected, he himself did not even attempt to define. Life during those
three years had been too abnormal--his own life and the life of the
community. Of course, he had understood while still in Kieff that he
would not remain long with Kasatkin, and that ahead of him lay poverty,
the loss of even the semblance of manhood. And so it came to pass.
He managed to scrape along through two more jobs, but under very
humiliating and oppressive conditions: eternally half-drunk, slovenly,
with voice turned hoarse, permeated through and through with the reek
of cheap, strong tobacco, making herculean efforts to conceal his
unfitness for business. Then he fell lower still; he returned to his
native town, and ran through his last kopeks; he spent his nights all
winter long in the general room of the lodging-house of Khodoff, whiled
away the days in Avdyeef’s eating-house in the Women’s Bazaar. Out of
these last kopeks many went for a stupid caprice, the publication of a
little volume of verses--after which he had to stroll about among the
patrons of Avdyeef’s establishment and force his booklet on them at
half-price.
But even that was not all: he came near turning into a buffoon! Once,
on a frosty, sunny morning, he was standing in the bazaar near the
flour shops and gazing at a barefoot beggar cutting up antics before
Mozzhukin the merchant, who had come out on his threshold. Mozzhukin,
drowsily derisive, with a face resembling the reflection in a samovar,
was chiefly interested in a cat which was licking his polished boot.
But the beggar did not stop. He thumped his breast with his fists and,
humping his shoulders, began in a hoarse voice to declaim:
“He who drinks when he is already drunk,
Plays the part of a wise man....”
And Kuzma, his swollen eyes beaming, suddenly cut in:
“Then long live jollity,
Long life to good liquor!”
And an old woman of the petty burgher class, who was passing by--she
had a face like that of an aged lioness--halted, cast a sidelong glance
at him, and, elevating her crutch, remarked distinctly and maliciously:
“’Tis likely you don’t know your prayers as well as that!”
Lower than that there was no place to fall. But precisely that was
what saved him. He survived several attacks of heart disease--and
immediately stopped getting drunk, firmly resolving to undertake
the simplest, most laborious sort of life; to hire, for example, an
orchard, a vegetable-garden; to purchase, somewhere in his native
county, a bee-farm. Fortunately, he still had a hundred and fifty
rubles left.
At first this idea delighted him. “Yes, that’s capital,” he said to
himself with that mournful ironical smile which he had acquired so
long ago. “’Tis time to go home!” And, of a truth, he needed a rest.
It was not very long since that vast agitation had begun, both within
him and round about him. But it had already done its work. He had
become something very different from what he had been previously. His
beard had turned completely grey; his hair, which he wore parted in
the middle, and which curled at the ends, had grown thin and acquired
a rusty hue; his broad face, with its high cheek-bones, had grown
darker and leaner than ever. His observing, sceptical mind had grown
more keen. His soul had been purified, had become more unhealthily
sensitive, although he was able to conceal the fact behind the serious
and, at times, even severe look of the little eyes under brows which
almost met across his nose. He had completely pulled himself together,
and had begun to think less of himself, more of those round about him.
Nevertheless, he longed to go “home” and rest: he craved work to his
liking.
V
In the spring, several months before the reconciliation with Tikhon,
Kuzma heard that a garden in the village of Kazakoff, in his native
district, was to be leased, and he hastened thither. It was a remote
spot, with black loam soil, not far from the place where the Krasoffs
had first taken root.
It was the beginning of May; cold weather and rain had returned after
a hot spell; gloomy autumnal storm-clouds sailed over the town. Kuzma,
in an old overcoat and without goloshes over his broken calfskin boots,
was trudging to the railway station beyond the Cannon-makers’ Suburb,
and, shaking his head and screwing up his face from the effects of the
cigarette held in his teeth, with hands clasped behind his back under
his overcoat, he was smiling to himself. A dirty little barefoot boy
ran up to him with a pile of newspapers and, as he ran, shouted briskly
the customary phrase: “Giniral strike!”
“You’re behind the times, my lad,” said Kuzma. “Isn’t there anything
newer?”
The small boy came to a halt, with flashing eyes.
“The policeman has carried the news off to the station,” he replied.
“All hail to the constitution!” said Kuzma caustically, and pursued
his course, skipping along through the mud, past fences darkened by
the rain, past the branches of dripping gardens and the windows of
lop-sided hovels which were sliding down hill, to the end of the
town street. “Wonders will never cease!” he said to himself as he
went leaping along. “In former days, with such weather, people would
have been yawning, hardly exchanging a word, in all the shops and
eating-houses. But now, all over the town, they do nothing but discuss
the Duma, riots and conflagrations, and how ‘Murontzeff[21] has given
the prime-minister a sound rating.’ Well, a frog does not keep its
tail very long!” The fireman’s band was already playing in the town
park. A whole company of kazaks had been sent. And the day before
yesterday, on Trading Street, one of them, when drunk, went up to the
window of the public library and made an insulting gesture to the young
lady librarian. An elderly cabman, who was standing near by, began to
reprove him, but the kazak jerked out his sabre from its scabbard,
slashed the cabman’s shoulder, and, cursing violently, rushed down the
street in pursuit of the people who were walking and driving past, and,
crazed with fear, were flying to the first shelter which presented
itself.
“The catskin man, the catskin man,
He fell down beneath a fence!”[22]
piped up some naughty little girls, in their thin voices, after Kuzma,
as they hopped from stone to stone, across the shallow stream of the
Suburb.
“When he skins cats, he gets the paws!”
“Ugh, you little wretches!” a railway conductor growled at them. In an
overcoat that was dreadfully heavy even to look at, he was walking in
front of Kuzma, and he shook a small iron box at them. “Why don’t you
pick on some one of your own age?”
But one could judge from his voice that he was restraining his
laughter. The conductor’s old, deep goloshes were crusted with dried
mud; the belt of his coat hung by a single button. The small bridge of
planks along which he was walking lay askew. Further on, alongside the
ditches flooded by the spring freshets, grew stunted bushes. And Kuzma
gazed cheerlessly at them, and at the straw-thatched roofs on the hill
of the Suburb; at the smoky and bluish clouds which hung over them,
and at the reddish-yellow cur which was gnawing a bone in the ditch.
In the bottom of the ditch, his legs straddled far apart, sat a petty
burgher, in a waistcoat over a cotton-print Russian shirt. His widely
opened eyes looked white in his face, which, scarlet with effort,
stared upward in an awkward, stupid grin. When Kuzma came opposite
him, he said, out of sheer clumsiness: “Is it you our little girls are
taunting? Why, those little imps learn effrontery in their infancy!”
“’Tis you yourselves who teach them,” replied Kuzma, with a frown.
“Yes, yes,” he said to himself, as he ascended the hill, “a frog does
not keep his tail long!” On reaching the crest of the hill, inhaling
the damp wind from the plain and catching sight of the red buildings
of the railway station in the midst of the empty green fields, he
again began to smile faintly. Parliament, deputies! Last night he had
returned from the public park, where, in honour of a holiday, there had
been an illumination, rockets had soared aloft, and the firemen had
played “Le Toreador” and “Beside the brook, beside the bridge,” “The
Maxixe” and “The Troika,” shouting in the middle of the galop, “Hey,
de-ear one!” He had returned home and had started to pull the bell at
the gate of his lodging-house. He had pulled and pulled the rattling
wire--not a soul. Not a soul anywhere around, either--only silence,
darkness, the cold greenish sky in the West, beyond the square at the
end of the street, and, overhead, storm-clouds. At last, some one
crawled forward behind the gate, clearing his throat. He rattled his
keys and grumbled: “I’m lame in my underpinning--”
“What’s the cause of it?”
“A horse kicked me,” replied the man; and, as he unlocked and opened
the gate, he added: “Well, now there are still two left.”
“The men from the court, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“But don’t you know why the judge came?”
“To try the deputy. They say he tried to poison the river.”
“What, the deputy? You fool, do deputies meddle with such things?”
“The devil only knows what they’ll do.”
On the outskirts of the Suburb, beside the threshold of a clay hut,
stood a tall old man wearing leg-cloths.[23] In the old man’s hand was
a long staff of walnut wood. On catching sight of a passer-by, he made
haste to pretend that he was much older than he really was. He grasped
the staff in both hands, hunched up his shoulders, and imparted to his
countenance a weary, melancholy expression. The damp, cold wind which
was blowing from the fields agitated the shaggy locks of his grey hair.
And Kuzma recalled his own father, his own childhood.
“Russia, Russia! Whither art thou dashing?” Gogol’s exclamation
recurred to his mind. “Russia, Russia! Akh, vain babblers, you stick
at nothing! That’s the best answer you can make: ‘The deputy tried
to poison the river.’ Yes, but who is responsible? First of all, the
unhappy populace--and unhappy they are!” And tears welled up in Kuzma’s
little green eyes--welled up suddenly, as had often happened with him
of late. Not long ago he had strolled into Avdyeeff’s eating-house, in
the Woman’s Bazaar. He had entered the courtyard, ankle deep in mud,
and from the courtyard ascended to the first storey--“the Gentry’s
Department”--by a wooden staircase so stinking, so rotten through and
through, that it turned even his stomach--the stomach of a man who had
seen sights in his day. With difficulty he had opened the heavy, greasy
door, covered with scraps of felt and tattered rags in place of a
proper casing, and provided with a pulley-weight fashioned from a brick
and a bit of rope. He was fairly blinded by the charcoal vapour, the
smoke, the glare of the tin reflectors behind the little wall-lamps,
and deafened by the crash of the dishes on the counter; by the talking,
the clatter of the waiters running about in all directions, and the
repulsive uproar of the gramophone. Then he passed on to the most
distant room, where there were fewer people, ate at a small table,
ordered a bottle of mead. Underfoot, on a floor soiled with the
trampling of feet and with spittle, lay slices of lemon, eggshells,
butts of cigarettes. And near the wall opposite sat a long-limbed
peasant in bast-slippers, smiling beatifically, shaking his frowsy
head, and listening to the shrieking gramophone. On his small table
were a small measure of vodka, a small glass, and cracknels. But the
peasant was not drinking: only wagging his head and staring at his
bast-shoes.
All of a sudden, becoming conscious of Kuzma’s gaze riveted upon him,
he opened his eyes wide with joy, raised his wonderfully kind face with
its waving reddish beard. “Well, so you’ve flown in!” he exclaimed,
in delight and surprise. And he hastened to add, by way of justifying
himself: “Sir, I have a brother who serves here--my own brother.”
Blinking away his tears, Kuzma clenched his teeth. Ugh, damn it, to
what a point had the people been trampled upon, beaten down! “You’ve
flown in!” That in connection with Avdyeeff’s establishment! And that
was not all: when Kuzma rose to his feet and said: “Well, goodbye!”
the peasant hurriedly rose to his feet also, and out of the fulness
of a happy heart, with profound gratitude for the light and luxury of
the surroundings, and because he had been addressed in a human manner,
quickly answered: “No offence meant!”